NO SON TREINTA PESOS, SON TREINTA AÑOS, una de las consignas emblemáticas de la revolución …
Some background on the estallido
4 stars
I had to officially move out of Chile to actually feel fully motivated to read this book. Human minds are really strange. Contardo offers a panoramic of Chilean society and political tensions up to just before the estallido. It's not an in-depth analysis or historical account, but more a collection of reflections, anecdotes and cultural references - all pointing to the enormous inequalities and arrogance that brought people to the streets in October 2019.
Months ago I had listened to the Guardian Long Read excerpted from this book, and I had been idlly meaning to read the rest ever since. Then, I watched Hunger, Steve McQueen's film about Bobby Sands' hunger strike, and decided it was time.
It is perhaps the best journalistic book I ever read (admittedly, it's not a genre with which I'm particularly familiar). Clearly, the author imagines a British audience, and so the first part of the book is devoted to persuading readers that IRA fighters are first and foremost people, whose decision to join an armed force was mainly shaped by the circumstances in which they found themselves (or, as a former fighter puts it, that they would not have become IRA fighters had not they been born in Northern Ireland). The argument does not go as far as to claim that terrorism is in the eyes of the …
Months ago I had listened to the Guardian Long Read excerpted from this book, and I had been idlly meaning to read the rest ever since. Then, I watched Hunger, Steve McQueen's film about Bobby Sands' hunger strike, and decided it was time.
It is perhaps the best journalistic book I ever read (admittedly, it's not a genre with which I'm particularly familiar). Clearly, the author imagines a British audience, and so the first part of the book is devoted to persuading readers that IRA fighters are first and foremost people, whose decision to join an armed force was mainly shaped by the circumstances in which they found themselves (or, as a former fighter puts it, that they would not have become IRA fighters had not they been born in Northern Ireland). The argument does not go as far as to claim that terrorism is in the eyes of the beholder, but the implication is at the very least that IRA fighters did not think of themselves in those terms.
The core of the book focuses on the number of lives wrecked by the troubles, by deaths, tortures, imprisonments, betrayals, mob violence, resentment. It is a thin line to tread - I can see many people thinking he's too soft on the IRA, and many others that by showing the sufferings of both sides he depoliticises the IRA's actions. Overall, I think one can really appreciate his journalistic commitment to report on the facts, whether or not they look good for one or the other party (also showing that the parties were not just two parties).
A leading data visualization expert explores the negative - and positive - influences that charts …
A primer on numeric / visual literacy
3 stars
A sort of 2019 mash-up of How to lie with statistics and How to lie with maps. Very readable and well-explained, though it's perhaps a shame that there is no engagement with critical epistemology, and a lot of gesturing at centrism and rationality.
La giovane è Katharina Blum, cameriera presso una famiglia della buona borghesia di Colonia, che …
L'onore perduto di Katarina Blum
5 stars
Uno dei libri riletti durante i mesi passati a casa dei miei durante la pandemia. Sebbene Böll sia stato per anni uno dei miei scrittori preferiti, di questo libro non ricordavo quasi nulla. Katharina é una donna indipendente, di umili origini e saldi principi. Si invaghisce di un giovane militante e ricercato - e per questo finisce nel mirino della polizia e, soprattutto, della stampa scandalistica (Bild). Nella ricerca dello scoop scandalistico, e in un clima di tensione anti-comunista, i giornalisti si accaniscono contro Katharina rovinandole la vita and conducendola all'omicidio (non é uno spoiler, perché il racconto parte da qua e si svolge come un flashback). Nell'epoca dei social media, fa effetto vedere quanto diverso, e quanto simile fosse il mondo cinquanta anni fa. Posso dire, con sollievo, che mi é ri-piaciuto.
Gabriel Axel trasse da questo racconto di Karen Blixen (1885-1962) un film indimenticabile per misura …
Mangiamo i pensieri che abbiamo e pensiamo il cibo che mangiamo
No rating
Babette giunge in un piccolo villaggio norvegese circondata da un alone di mistero. Scappata dalla Francia della Comune, forse attiva nelle barricate. Viene accolta da due sorelle non sposate, figlie di un pastore protestante che ha costruito una comunitá puritana basata sull'abnegazione e la modestia. Per anni, si adatta al lore stile di vita, servendolo con dedizione e facendosi amare dall'intera comunitá.
Poi, coi soldi vinti alla lotteria, chiede di poter organizzare un pranzo 'alla francese'. Le sorelle accettano, esitanti, e quando comunicano le loro perplessitá alla comunitá tutti gli invitati si ripromettono di non fare commenti sul cibo, per quanto delizioso, esotico o disgustoso sia.
La scena del banchetto é un miracolo di ironia: gli ospiti (inconsapevolmente ubriachi) scambiano la pace dei sensi con la grazia divina. Il pranzo é un trionfo, un'opera d'arte per un pubblico completamente incapace di apprezzarla.
I have been on a serious Bechdel fan-girl kick. Tascha gave me this book as a spontaneous gift. I devoured it, and then worked my way backwards through her memoir, Are you my mother? and Fun home.
I'm writing this as an overall review, not really a summary, just some scattered remarks about my journey. First, it is amazing how Bechdel can keep retelling her life from different perspectives, using different lenses to make sense of things in a way that is entertaining. Second, I really like how in this latest once she really gets to the madness / banality / desperation of exercise culture, but does so from a point of empathy and personal involvement, so instead of coming across as judgemental she is insightful and compassionate (reminds me a bit of that article on barre). Third, maybe the fact that, on this third read, I found …
I have been on a serious Bechdel fan-girl kick. Tascha gave me this book as a spontaneous gift. I devoured it, and then worked my way backwards through her memoir, Are you my mother? and Fun home.
I'm writing this as an overall review, not really a summary, just some scattered remarks about my journey. First, it is amazing how Bechdel can keep retelling her life from different perspectives, using different lenses to make sense of things in a way that is entertaining. Second, I really like how in this latest once she really gets to the madness / banality / desperation of exercise culture, but does so from a point of empathy and personal involvement, so instead of coming across as judgemental she is insightful and compassionate (reminds me a bit of that article on barre). Third, maybe the fact that, on this third read, I found Are you my mother? fascinating (event the parts about therapy) is a sign of aging. Dense and slow, at times eye-roll inducing and far-fetched, often navel-gazing and irritating, but I didn't skip a single page. Fun home is an amazing twin-portrait of her and her father, sweet and angry. TCLS, I loved all three of them, all over again.
Ricordo di aver letto questo libro nel mio primo anno di un'universitá. Ció nonostante, ogni pagina é stata una completa sorpresa: non mi ricordavo assolutamente della trama soap-operescha e dei personaggi le cui storie si intrecciano attorno a palazzo Yacoubian, un (vero) edificio nel centro del Cairo, un tempo centro dell'aristocrazia e alta borghesia coloniali, ora un posto dove i nuovi e vecchi ricchi si mescolano con gli straccioni e i giovani frustrati dall'ingiustizia e dalla corruzione. Mi é piaciuto moltissimo, al punto che gli perdono persino la vena omofobica (i gay sono fatti cosí, tendono ad avere questa espressione triste e spiacevole, etc).
As the subtitle says, this is a history of the world's most liberal city. To …
An introduction to Amsterdam
3 stars
This was actually a pretty good book, albeit very straight and male. It essentially a pop-history book, but made arguably more elegant by having an overarching if somewhat simplistic argument throughout: that Amsterdam is the birth place of liberalism, both meant as a set of ideas concerning freedom, tolerance and human rights, and also as an ideology promoting individualism and self-enrichment. Indeed, those are two side of the same coin. The argument kind of works, connecting disparate topics that seem important to Amsterdam's history: land reclamation (which requires collaboration but was carried out so that individuals retained control over land), trade, bourgeois portrait art, the resistance to and complicity with the Nazi, coffee shop and counter culture, social housing. In the chapters about the more recent history, however, I struggled to overlook the book's smug celebration of Dutch (and US) society, its quick glossing over the horrors of colonialism, the …
This was actually a pretty good book, albeit very straight and male. It essentially a pop-history book, but made arguably more elegant by having an overarching if somewhat simplistic argument throughout: that Amsterdam is the birth place of liberalism, both meant as a set of ideas concerning freedom, tolerance and human rights, and also as an ideology promoting individualism and self-enrichment. Indeed, those are two side of the same coin. The argument kind of works, connecting disparate topics that seem important to Amsterdam's history: land reclamation (which requires collaboration but was carried out so that individuals retained control over land), trade, bourgeois portrait art, the resistance to and complicity with the Nazi, coffee shop and counter culture, social housing. In the chapters about the more recent history, however, I struggled to overlook the book's smug celebration of Dutch (and US) society, its quick glossing over the horrors of colonialism, the unthinking treatment of anti-squatting laws as common sense.
I think of this book as the companion to Fifty Sounds, in that they are both memoirs and reflection on language. If Fifty Sounds is about learning a new one and feeling alien in a far-away place that doesn't ever quite become familiar, A/A is about the feeling of nostalgia, the ways one remains attached to their mother tongue and childhood home, and reworks them in new ways that fit new places, new languages, new skills. De Meijer manages to talk about being multilingual without coming across as pretentious or self-congratulatory, or plain boring. Perhaps by virtue of being of Afghan-Punjabi-Kenyan descent she also manages to describe her love for the Netherlands in a way that doesn't feel claustrophobic or reactionary.
